PINK FLOYD
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
1. Introduction
(Speak To Me playing)
RW: Dark Side Of The Moon was an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian
empathy that was desperate to get out.
(Us and Them playing)
RWr: Dark Side, I think... it felt like the whole band were working together. It was a very
creative time. We were very open as well...
RW: ...I think because we still had a common goal which was to become rich and famous.
(Money playing)
DG: The ideas that Roger was exploring apply to every new generation. They still have very
much the same relevance as they had.
(Brain Damage playing)
NM: I think one of the successes of Dark Side is the fact that actually it's very rich: there's a
lot... there are a lot of songs, a lot of ideas all compressed onto the one record.
DG: I can clearly remember that moment of sitting and listening to the whole mix all the way
through... and thinking: my God, we've really... done something fantastic here...
(Eclipse playing)
Bhaskar Menon (former Capitol Records chairman): I think it has the all-time record, constantly
on the charts for nearly 750 weeks, about 14 years.
Nigel Williamson (Journalist): It was a huge album, and huge not just in terms of its sales, but in
terms of its influence. This was where underground music, progressive rock, whatever, really
went mainstream.
Robert Sandall (Journalist and Broadcaster): It was a record that had lots of traditional pop
values, you could sing along to these songs, but it also was a kind of thing that took you places if
you wanted to listen to it in a darkened room.
David Fricke (Senior Editor - Rolling Stone Magazine): It may very well be the ultimate concept
record, because the concept is there, the songs are there, the spaces and the music are there, but it
doesn't take away any of the imagination.
RW: After Syd went crazy in '68 and Dave joined, we were - all of us - searching, fumbling
around, looking for... "what are we gonna do now?", because here was the guy who starts
producing all these songs, and was the sort of heartbeats of the band.
Storm Thorgerson (Album Sleeve Design): Syd casts a long and large shadow of events. I think
that the band was very impressive to keep going, actually, after loss of their main creative drive,
I mean it was the first time you choose, isn't it, I mean you wouldn't sit around say ok let's
/*give up our*/ song writer.
NW: After Syd had gone the music became more kind of soundscapes than songs.
RW: You have to watch your strengths, and it was a very good thing that we could not write
singles, we might not have done some of the very interesting work that we did.
DF: Once Syd was out of the picture, the Floyd just went glacial; they just let it all spread out.
2. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
(Set the controls playing)
DF: When I saw the Floyd for the first time it was the summer of '68, it was actually their first
American tour with David Gilmour, and they were just extraordinary, you know, it was "Let
there be more light", "Set the controls for the heart of the sun", it was total space rock.
DG: I started fully out of love with that... some of that psychedelic noodling stuff.
RWr: We were still then playing a lot of instrumental work, if you like, and that would be half
the album.
RW: But we were always searching for a direction.
DG: ...fighting a little bit between wanting to push boundaries back a little bit and move forward
in an experimental way, but also to retain melody. When you get to "Meddle", quite clearly
"Echoes" shows the direction that we were moving in.
RW: The rest of "Meddle" as I recall was songs, and so, you know, the flip side was a 20-minute
piece a) and so was a construct, and b) it was the beginning of all the writing about other people.
3. Echoes
(Echoes playing: strangers passing in the street, by chance two separate glances meet, and I am
you and what I see is me)
RW: It was the beginning of empathy, if you like, you know, "two strangers passing in the street,
by chance two passing glances meet, and I am you and what I see is me" is a sort of thread that
has gone through everything for me ever since then... and had a big eruption in Dark Side.
NW: You have to remember the context of the time. This was the height of glam rock: there was,
you know, Marc Bolan, and T.Rex, and David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust peddling there, sort of
pop fantasies, and the Floyd came along with an album that was about these weighty themes.
DF: He created a story, he created a... basically a theater piece about what it was like to live in
the modern world.
NM: All four of us were there, and there was a discussion about putting the album together and
making it into this "themed", this...I mean what is now called a "concept" album.
RW: There are a number of things that impinge upon an individual to... the... colour his view of
existence. There are pressures that are capable of pushing you one direction or another, and these
are some of them... and... whether they push you towards insanity, death, empathy, greed,
whatever, - there's something about the Newtonian view of that physics that might be interesting
and may be there could be... this is what this record is about...
NM: There was one of those really good moments that most bands do experience where
everyone is on sight, and everyone likes the idea, and there's some sort of agreement as to, more
or less, who's going to do what.
DG: Dark Side Of The Moon started in a rehearsal room in Bermondsey I think that belongs... a
warehouse that belongs to The Rolling Stones where we did some... sort of jammy writing,
whatever you want to call it.
RW: Not sure how much writing happened there. You know, let's play an E minor or an A for an
hour or two, oh that sounds all right, that will take up 5 minutes.
4. Breathe
DG: A lot of the musical ideas just came up just sort of jamming away in these rehearsal
rooms... /*obviously*/ the lyrics Roger brought in...
RWr: ...because he had things to say. And it was the first time that he wrote all the lyrics...
DG: Roger was all sorts of a pushing, driving force...
RS: The way "Dark Side Of The Moon" articulates some sense of early adult's disenchantment
is absolutely timeless...
RW: I've listened to it again recently, and it always amazes me that I c... that I got away with it
really, because it was so "lower sixth", and... you know... uhm... "breathe, breathe in the air,
don't be afraid to care". In fact, I think, within the context of the music and within the context of
the pieces at whole: people are prepared to accept that simple exultation to be prepared to stand
your ground and attempt to live your life in an authentic way.
(DG playing first chords)
RWr: I came from jazz basically... I love it... that's my favorite... that's my inspiration. And the
interesting thing about this song is, I told you about jazz, is this certain chord... which is... that
is totally down to a chord I had heard on /*actually*/ Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue", which
is a... that chord!.. that chord I just loved! And when we're doing "Breathe", we got to G - I got
to G - and how'd you get to E again? Well, again, normally you go... but... uhm... I remember
this chord and I remember working it out at home listening to the record, and I just thought...
RWr: Dave was brilliant at double tracking vocals. And we could do machines, but it is a
difference.
Alan Parsons: There's also a harmony part... And that's it how it's sung... Back to the band!..
There's two organ parts which come in now... They had been performing this work on as
"Eclipse" for a few months I think, before actually even coming in to Abbey Road to start the
first recordings...
DG: ...which meant that the performances were pretty tight and not so hard to get.
RW: When you're working in a band and you're performing something, it... willy-nilly it
develops and changes...
5. On The Run
NM: In pre-bootlegging days this of course was a far more effective and better way of doing
things, because you went in the studio and rehearsed up.
DG: We'd been playing it live that way for quite some time as a sort of guitar jam, that sort of a
piece. I think we were none of us that happy with it as a piece, and when we also had this
synthesizer...
RW: ...this Synth EA which had a little built-in keyboard and had a sequencer... it was the first
sequencer I think...
DG: I just plugged this up and started playing one sequence on it, and Roger immediately
pricked up his ears and said that sounded good, and came up, and we started mocking with it
together... and he put in a new sequence of notes, and all developed out of that...
RW: A series of notes played in slowly... triggering a noise generator and oscillators, and then
just speed it up, you know...
DG: You've got it basically... And that, of course, immediately sounded much more exciting
than what we were currently doing.
Chris Thomas (Mix Supervisor): They were the first band to really go out and try to sort of make
music of the future.
NM: We were doing a lot of things with tape loops and curious sounds and sound effects...
RS: There wasn't something in 1972 when they put that album together. But that's basically
what they were doing. They were... in a sense they were giving you a preview of the sound
pictures of the future.
NW: You know, there are some very very clever and hearty listenable pieces of sonic
experimentation.
DG: So this is the main synthesizer, it has the high-hat element built-in. Then we treated with
filters and with other oscillators to get this sort of vibrato noise. And we're bringing this guitar,
it's a backwards guitar with echoes upon it, it's been played with a mike stand leg, just sliding
up... That was left-to-right across the stereo. And there's these synthesizers, Morph synth's,
which are creating sort of futuristic vehicle noises, which you take the pitch down a little bit, and
pan it at the same time... That creates an artificial Doppler sound, looks like this ambulance is
whizzing past you... Bringing some footsteps... and some heartbeats for extra tension... As you
see there's an awful lot going on this track...
AP: This section in particular, The Travel Section or On The Run section I think was pretty
complicated... A lot of hands on deck...
DG: You do always want to put more things on than you had tracks for... So tracks would very
suddenly change from one thing to a different thing
RWr: All of us were on the desk, our fingers on the faders.
AP: But that's the way it was, because we didn't have automation in those days...
DG: A mix in those days was a performance, every bit as much as doing a gig.
AP: It's one thing actually that we've kind of lost in the modern age.
CT: Very very well-engineered, it was also very very carefully constructed. /*Sort of as known
as... sort of...*/ you know everything was well-recorded.
AP: Dark Side was really the first proper engineering job I'd been given with the Floyd. So there
was pretty much putting on the deep end.
NM?: He was very good musically as well.
DG: He also came up with a couple of good ideas.
AP: I was commissioned to record some clocks for sound effects, record for the very early days
of quadrophony.
DG: And when we were doing Time he suggested we might like to have these clocks.
NM: My memory of it is just this room full of tapes rolling around, because it was without any
sort of computer help, everything had to be done manually.
AP: Getting all the clocks to chime at the right time - that was a process of just finding a
particular moment on the multi-track tape where all the chiming would happen, and then back-
timing the quarter-inch originals which contained each of the clocks...
NM: And then the very critical thing of tapes starting at specific moments, which was all done
with hand signs and stop-watches.
6. Time
(Time playing)
AP: We got the girls making their first appearance here... That's un-processed... And we
actually put this effect called a frequency translation on, which made them sound like this...
Here's the solo...
DG: This one was probably taking some shape live before we ever got to doing it, but usually in
the studio on this sort of thing you just have a player over it and see what comes, and it's usually
and mostly the first tape is the best one, and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.
NW: The 1970s was the era of the guitar. And he had that sort of very "bluesy" sound but then
also he had that other sound, that sort of spacey, very crystalline, almost ethereal quality.
RW: I suddenly realized then that year that life was already happening. /*...*/ 'cause my mother
was so obsessed with education and the idea that childhood and adolescence and... well,
everything was about preparing for a life that was going to start later. And I suddenly realized
that life wasn't going to start later, that it is... you know, it starts at dot and it happens all the
time, and then... at any point you can grasp the reins and start guiding your own destiny. And
that was a big revelation to me, I mean, it came as quite a shock.
NW: One of the greatest lines I think on Dark Side Of The Moon is Roger's line about "hanging
on in quiet desperation is the English way", which is a sort of line you could imagine - I don't
know - Evelyn Waugh or Somerset Maugham or someone writing as an observation on the
English character. And I think that character does /*permiate*/ the whole record, and indeed the
whole of Pink Floyd's career.
(Gilmour playing Breathe Reprise)
RW: It expresses my feelings about things very simply. And I think that musically... and I think
that the music is /*...*/ driven by that emotional commitment.
RWr?: The band basically wanted another 4 or 5 minutes of music, and we thought it could be an
instrumental.
RWr: I think I just - as I always have done - is I sat at the piano... and I... and those first two
chords came.
RW: Us And Them and The Great Gig In The Sky, you know, are fabulous chord sequences, are
really truly wonderful pieces of music.
7. The Great Gig In The Sky
?: Why should I be frightened of dying, there's no reason for it. You gotta go some time.
RW: I've no idea whose idea it was to get somebody as a female singer and... but Alan Parsons
knew Clare Torry and had been working with her, and said why don't you try her...
CT: She went in there and improvised over. Yeah, that was amazing, that was fantastic! But that
was a /*moreover*/ mixing.
RWr: We knew what we wanted, not exactly musically, but we knew that we wanted someone to
just improvise over this piece. So we directed her /*...*/: "think about death, think about horror,
think whatever, and just go and sing". And my memory is, that she went out in the studio and did
it very very quickly, and then came back in and said: "I'm really sorry about this, very
embarrassed". And we in fact were sitting in the studio saying: "This is wonderful".
RW: And of course it's absolutely brilliant, both Rick's piano and organ work, and Clare's
singing is just incredibly moving.
AP: In the very end of this, I remember, we increased the echo slowly.
DG: We always wanted to kind of not be on our covers ourselves, not have pictures.
RWr?: It is probably the most recognized album cover of all time.
RW: It's something that you can sit and look at for a long time without getting fed up with it.
NM: The prism is the logo that absolutely defines the record.
ST: Dark Side Of The Moon prism design comes from 3 basic ingredients, one of which is the
light show that the band put on tour trying to represent; and also one of the themes of the lyrics
which was, I think, about ambition and greed; and the third - it was an answer to Rick Wright
who said that he wanted something...
RWr: ...simple and bold, and dramatic...
ST: The presentation, as we call it, of the design to the band was a very brief affair.
DG: He just brought in 3 or 4 ideas...
RWr: I do remember instantly seeing the pyramid...
ST: They came in and they looked around, and they went: "mmm, that one!"
NM: Everyone immediately went: "Terrific! Great! Let's do that".
ST: /*As epitomized by their band why they had to*/ choose it so quickly and so easily is, I just
think it is somehow very fitting, I mean, it's hard to imagine it without it, isn't it really?
NM: The story in America /*...*/ of disaster that really we hadn't sold records. And like all good
artists the first thing you do is blame the record company. But in this particular case I think we
might get a few more people to agree that they hadn't performed properly. And so there was a
/*...*/ man called Bhaskar Menon who was absolutely terrific. And he decided he was going to
make this work and he was going to make the American company sell this record. And he did!
BM: We devised a marketing campaign for this, which was far more extensive than anything that
the company had ever done. It was an album that came after virtually a year of touring. There
was a tremendous amount of credible press. We had by this time without a single got this album
tremendous sales, close to about a million albums by that stage, you know, which was quite
remarkable. And I knew that the time would come when we would have to get on to the next
stage, to get to the next category or level of audience. We really would need some single-like
material.
DG: They always say, you know, you need a hit single, and we had a sort of hit single with
Money.
8. Money
(Money playing - demo by Roger Waters)
RW: You know, I would have remembered writing Money as a sort of very "bluesy" thing. I
can't sing that up in that register of that...
(Money played by Roger Waters)
RW: And there's a very kind of transatlantic, bluesy sort of twang to it all. Listening to the
original demo - it's not like that at all, it's all very kind of prissy and very English.
DF: The one thing about Money that I think people forget is that it's got the weirdest...it's one of
the biggest hits with the weirdest time signature.
DG: Very unusual 7/8 time. Good riff.
(Money playing)
DG: I'd played in a band with Dick when we were a sort of teenagers in Cambridge.
NM: Dick was... was sort of a part of the Cambridge mafia.
DG: I didn't know any other sax players and was probably too nervous to ask anyone /*who will
turn it off*/.
NM: He was terrific.
DG: Well Dick did his sax solo in the 7/8 time. And then we sort of sat and worked out a
different sequence for the guitar solo, probably to make my life easier so I didn't have to think
about the timing.
RWr: I love the fact that it does change. Let me say, lots of things happened on Dark Side Of
The Moon are kind of magical... without us intentionally making them happen. It just happened.
And I think that's one of the great things about Money is that it does change time signatures.
DF: And that's the thing: he goes back into the 4/4 and all of a sudden - man, it's rock city!
(Solo)
DF: Money is an amazing single because it's about the very thing that it became - it's about
success.
DG: Something certainly did the trick and it moved us up into a super league, I suppose you
might say, which brought with it some great joy, some pride and some problems.
RWr: Of course it changed our life and we were now a big rock-n-roll band playing at stadiums.
DG: You don't know what you're in it for anymore. You know, you're in it to achieve massive
success and get rich and famous and all these other things that go along with it. And when they're
all suddenly done you're going... mmm well... why... what next?
RW: It's not to say we didn't do some good work, but the good work we did was actually all
about a lot of the negative aspects of what went on after we'd achieved... the goal.
DG: I mean that obviously informed what turned out to be the next album quite deeply - Wish
you were here - because we weren't, most of us most of the time.
DF: They were a platinum monster and it's not a lot of fun.
(The Violent Sequence playing)
DG: Sort of amazing to me now that we had that piece of music in 1969 when we recorded the
music for Zabriskie Point. And throughout, I guess, Atom Heart Mother, the Obscured By
Clouds album, the Meddle album we didn't dig it out and use it, such a lovely piece of music.
RWr: Antonioni didn't really know what he wanted.
NM: He needed desperately to have control. So even if you did the right thing and it was
perfect he couldn't bear to accept it because there wasn't a choice.
RW: All he really wanted was Careful With That Axe, Eugene.
RWr: I think we were all getting a bit frustrated of "what does he want?". I think I was just
sitting in the studio and I was seeing the piano and I happened to have that Violent Sequence up
and I was watching it and /*perhaps I felt*/ a bit tired or whatever, I just started the chord
sequence. At the time I think everyone thought: this is really good.
DG: When we thought we'd really got something brilliant for his movie, Antonioni would say...
RW: "It's beautiful, but is too sad", you know, "It makes me think of church".
DG: It was obviously waiting to be reborn in this album.
9. Us And Them
RW: The lyrics are so direct and linear: those fundamental issues of whether or not the human
race is capable of being humane. What's good about the writing of this song, from my point of
view, is the leaving of the gaps for the repeat echo.
(Us and Them playing)
AP: It's kind of strange hearing it without it... without the echoes in it.
(Us and Them playing)
RW: I find myself with instrumentalists over the years working with people having very-very
often as a producer in my capacity for producing records having to say to people: now leave the
whole, now just play for half a bar and then leave a bar and a half free, empty. And that's kind of
what that song is, that's the way it works.
DF: The simplicity of Floyd is really almost hard to talk about because it is so simple. Nick
Mason playing very slowly, you know, exact, without a lot of overly freely percussion
flourishes. Richard's touch on piano, on organ - very gentle, very soft, but also exact, and just
hitting the notes right. It was always about leaving space.
(Us and Them playing)
RW: I think, Dave and Rick - their harmony vocals on it are really very affecting. Funny
enough, they have similar voices, both their voices are a big factor in Dark Side Of The Moon
the way they blend.
AP: That's Dave and Rick together. Then Rick /*does another part ... lower than he did*/. And
then the girls are also joining in.
Roger the Hat: "I mean, they're not gunna kill ya, so if you give 'em a quick short, sharp, shock,
they don't do it again. Dig it? I mean he got off lightly, 'cos I could've given him a thrashing - I
only hit him once! It was only a difference of right and wrong, ain't it? I mean good manners
don't cost nothing, do they, eh?"
RW: It seemed to me really important... I can't... I've no idea why to have voices on this thing.
And so the only thing that was clever about it at all was how to do it so not to have an interview.
NM: Devised probably in the canteen and done later that evening.
RW: So I wrote a bunch of cards with the questions on them.
RS: I think what the voices did on the record was they actually brought out the dark side; they
were in a way the dark side of the record.
NM: First, we used a number of people who worked in the studio with us, so we used 3 or 4 of
our road crew.
Chris Adamson: "I ain't frightened of dying at all, 'cause when you gotta go - you gotta go".
DG: That Irish doorman here Gerry: "Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason
for it, you gotta go some time".
NM: "Wings" were recording in here at the same time, so we actually used Paul and Linda,
Henry McCullough: "I don't know, I was really drunk at the time".
DG: It's the people who are not used to being interviewed, who come up with the stuff.
RW: I think they started off with "what's your favorite color?" and "your favorite food?" And
when none of which was just to get people there... and then they went into "when was the last
time you were violent?" This was the good bit: "when was the last time you were violent?" And
then you'd take... you'd answer it and take the next card, the next card said "were you in the
right?"
?: "Yeah, heh heh, I was in the right"
?: "Yes, absolutely in the right"
?: "I certainly was in the right"
?: "Yeah, I was definitely in the right, that geezer was cruising for a bruising"
NM: And this remarkable roadie called Roger the Hat: "If I participate in this fucking effort, I'll
buy... I'm gunna get my gold disc at the end of it, imagine that, ahhh!"
CT: They were trying to track him down to do the cards. By the time they got all of them,
somebody... the cards had gone missing, I don't know where they'd gone. So Roger Waters
actually /*didn't that doing it*/, he actually did that one as an interview.
RW: So, /*...you think you came*/ mad, Roger?
Roger the Hat: /*I once had a stage*/ in my life when I was completely convinced I'd gone over
the brink /*or that's what I had to call it*/
10. Brain Damage
RW: It has obviously a bit to do with Syd, and I think it's about defending the notion of being
different.
(Brain Damage played by Waters)
RW: The fundamental question that's facing us all is whether or not we're capable of dealing
with the whole question of us and them
DF: What he was feeling as an individual mirrored almost exactly what a lot of other people
were feeling at the time in their own lives.
RS: There's no question in my mind that Dark Side of the Moon was one of the most important
artistic statements of the last fifty years probably. It touched very many people all over the world
in ways that could not simply be put down /*the fact*/ that: "oh, the /*nice*/ tunes" and "oh, I
like that bit at the end", I mean, this was a complete experience.
DF: It was actually a really grim time, and he wrote a very grim record but did it with music that
was extremely uplifting and compelling and bewitching.
RWr: I think it was a very very happy and creative and enjoyable time when we made this
album.
NM: It was probably the most focused moment in our career in terms of all of us working
together as a band.
DG: I'd love to have been a person who could sit back with his headphones on, listen to that the
whole way through for the first time, I mean I never had that experience, I tell you, it would've
been nice.
CT: The thing that's often missed is the fact that basically people respond to that on the
emotional level, and that's what makes great records.
RW: It's driven by emotion, there's nothing plastic about it, you know, there is nothing contrived
about it, and I think that's what is giving it its - or maybe one of the things that's giving it - its
longevity.
11. Eclipse chapter
(Eclipse playing)
RW: But that's not to say that potential for the sun to shine doesn't exist, you know. Walk down
the path towards the light rather than walking to the darkness.
Gerry: There is no dark side in the moon really, matter of fact it's all dark...
Transcribed by YPAL, please send your comments to ypal@mail.ru